Many of you have some familiarity with Canada's-yellow-vest-movement.
You may know how different it is from the Gilets Jaunes in France.
Perhaps some of you have even rallied on Saturdays in front of Hamilton city hall, hopefully in support of love and diversity, but I am well aware that as one of the leaders of "Peace in the Hammer", I am one of the people that yellow vests watch online and in person, and talk about.
What you may not know is that yellow vests began rallying in front of city hall every Saturday beginning December 4, 2018.
That's right. It was a full year of Saturdays. And shortly after they started rallying, the counter rallies of people in Hamilton who believe in peace, love, acceptance, inclusion, and diversity (some of us have adopted the acronym PLAID - see facebook.com/PLAIDHamilton/ and it is also on Twitter) began.
By June, not many knew yet about these weekly rallies. Then Pride 2019 happened in Hamilton on June 15. This is one of many reports about that awful day. I missed it because that was the day the Save the Wesley Day Centre effort kicked off, but I heard all about it, like the rest of Hamilton.
Most of us did not know this then but police would later arrest two yellow vests for violence near city hall the week before, June 8.
It was not the first arrest connected to the protests. The earliest report I can find online was from a year ago, January 27, 2019. Apparently it was not possible to ascertain "which side" the arrestee was on. This kind of "both sides" verbiage was to plague us as people simply taking time from our lives to stand up for vulnerable people from other countries who were being intimidated by yellow vests.
While council began looking at means to stop hate groups from parking themselves outside city hall every Saturday as early as June 2019, the rallies went on. And on. Reported on in local news here in June, here in July, and here in August (the infamous 'bus incident').
By September, it was old news. Counter-protesters were fewer; councillors and the Mayor were not making appearances any more for the most part (with significant exceptions from time to time); and the media seemed tired of reporting on it.
But the counter protests went on and the weather grew colder. And one of the protests was not at city hall but at Mohawk College where Maxime Bernier was speaking. This was a typical media misrepresentation of that day.
Let me tell you what really happened. I was in one of the first groups to arrive for the counter protest. There were already well over a dozen yellow vests, Sons of Odin, and Proud Boys waiting for us. They began taunting and cat-calling us as soon as they saw us. I was with the Love in the Hammer Choir as usual , and so we began to sing our songs about love and acceptance, while the haters jeered and criticized our singing, feeling safe and cocky behind a human shield of police lined up to keep the two groups of ralliers separate.
As more people came up, some joined our singing. Most just stood in a supportive group, neither hindering nor speaking to those who chose to go in to hear Maxime speak. There was an altercation that happened too fast for most of us to see and the first arrest of the day happened as Maximiliano Herrera, who had walked to the protest in my group and had been laughing and joking with us only a short time before, was hauled into police custody in great distress and taken away.
It felt surreal. We were standing there singing, the hater 'security' aka bully boys were standing behind the police shouting and jeering, trying to create a reaction from us, and then Maxime Bernier himself came up. Again, everything happened very quickly with pushing and shoving and shouting, Councillor John-Paul Danko was nearly trampled while trying to protect one of his constituents whose sign was destroyed in the fracas, and then Bernier was inside and we were all trying to regain our composure.
At the same time as the great majority were peacefully protesting, a determined group of anti-fascists were trying to impede people from going in and were chanting slogans at them. One of them, of course, became notorious as the person who allegedly tried to stop an elderly lady from going inside. But the narrative that quickly escalated ignored many facts about the situation including those detailed here.
It was no surprise to me that a 'viral video' became the sole narrative of the event. I saw from the moment I arrived that the haters all had cameras and video-cameras.
They were waiting for a chance to catch one of those of us who were standing up against hatred and intolerance on video doing something they could make viral.
And they got their wish. But we also achieved some key goals. I personally witnessed, because I was so close, the doubt on the face of the PPC candidate who afterward withdrew from the race, Chad Hudson..
My friends and I also learned a valuable lesson about how severely distorted media accounts can be, so that they barely resemble what actually happened. Some media accounts were more extensively researched and more compassionate, such as this one by Samantha Craggs.
But when one of our own was viciously attacked, pushed out into Main Street, and repeatedly kicked in the head in December (after a Year of Saturdays!), this was a report.
However, something good came of this horrific incident. One of the yellow vest ringleaders was banned from city hall, and since then, the yellow vests have not been back.
Dare we hope the Year of Saturdays is finally over?
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